Don’t Follow the Suits, Follow the Weirdos
Cryptocurrency was invented by a guy who liked message boards.
Then a young developer who thought decentralization could go even further kicked off a world computer with a white paper and some emails.
The big wins in crypto are going to come from the punks, the hippies, the malcontents and the contrarians. What I’m saying is: In this very bullish season, don’t be enraptured by the suits.
This article is excerpted from The Node, CoinDesk’s daily roundup of the most pivotal stories in blockchain and crypto news. You can subscribe to get the full newsletter here.
We see the allure of the suits here at CoinDesk in a very direct way. For a few years, we saw an onslaught of corporate blockchain accelerators and pilot projects that were never about … well, anything. It was obvious “innovation theater,” but toward what end? Who knows?
I appreciate the allure. The whole argument to be “grown-up” seems very convincing. Yes, the future of blockchains is probably enterprise something something … it sounded truthy.
Now the suits are back and it looks like this time they are here for real. Instead of “blockchain not bitcoin” it seems like we have hit an inflection point where a lot of the rich guys hold a little BTC and maybe some ETH.
So is it all “game over” once Goldman or Morgan Stanley opens up a crypto division?
Game, set and match. Satoshi has won! Sooo … Wall Street can take it from here, right?
Just today, Visa announced a demo project using an Ethereum stablecoin. So this is all … settled?
That’s not where I’d place my bets.
I would suggest continuing to look at what the tinkerers are up to.
The method works; it’s where I have invested my reporting attention and it keeps paying off. Like non-fungible tokens (NFTs) now? I first wrote about them in 2018. I told you about OpenSea three years before the venture capitalists at a16z dropped $23 million into the NFT marketplace. Were you happy about the UNI airdrop? This guy gave you a heads up about Uniswap a year before it started to shake up the space. The DeFi summer of 2020 was wild, right? Well, I first told you about the decentralized finance market Compound in 2018 and I was digging into MakerDAO regularly through 2019.
It’s not hard to find real stuff out on the edge. That’s where all of it is.
The suits show up when sectors become safe, after they plateau. They show up when something can be turned into a nice, predictable little business. They show up once it’s boring. If they manage to show up early, they show up to make it boring.
DAOs
The opposite of the suits is DAOs, decentralized autonomous organizations.
The first big one didn’t work out great. Shortly after that debacle, MakerDAO decided to get a lot more formal, though the protocol itself continued to be governed by token holders.
For a while, it might have looked like the suits, with their proofs-of-concept and press releases and sticky note-covered innovation labs were winning. But that had clearly changed by last summer when we saw DeFi take off and people started to once again get excited about organizations that exist entirely on blockchains, with no formal instantiation in the legally governed world.
The most prominent DAO in this space doesn’t even really use that branding. It is Yearn Finance. I often wonder how many people who put their assets into Yearn think about the fact that there are a bunch of actual people behind this thing. What might be called the “staff” of Yearn put a ton of time into it, they make a lot of money from it and – at least insofar as I have ever been able to determine – none of that occurs under the auspices of any sort of formal organization as you or I might normally expect. No company. Just a baby giant, growing.
We got a rare glance under the hood about how it works when Tracheopteryx, who functions in a sort of chief operations officer-ish role within Yearn, spoke at ETH Denver:
But basically, we have a bunch of smart contracts written by an enigmatic DeFi artiste that attracted a bunch of other savvy degens to get involved and start suggesting ways to juice the already considerable profits on assets dropped into Yearn.
This is not normal. This is weird. Yet, Yearn and other DAOs like it will grow and shake things up further.
Facebook/Libra
On the other end of the spectrum, we have Facebook’s foray into crypto: born as libra, downgraded to diem.
The social network thought that it could convince global regulators to allow it to upend the way money works by asking nicely and showing up at a lot of legislative hearings.
It turned out that asking permission to disrupt global industries doesn’t work that well.
Zuckerberg and Co. never really appeared to have actual conviction about decentralization. The company needed to diversify its revenue streams if Facebook was going to let users communicate privately, as the company had been promising in 2019.
But playing nice with the global money cops didn’t work out, so it moved on.
Actual change comes from folks too irascible to quit doing something because someone tells them it’s a bad idea or it doesn’t fit their conception of how we’ve always done things.
So if big banks and financial companies and payment firms want to hop in, cool, let them. But that’s not when the excitement starts. That’s when the excitement ends.
If you want excitement, keep your eyes on the folks with unicorns on their shirts, buzzes in their hair and/or chains hanging off … wherever — weirdos for the win.
Recommended News
-
The first year of the blockchain: Consensus Alliance enters the blockchain industry
Blockchain technology is derived from Bitcoin, as people know more about blockchain technology, the blockchain industry is also undergoing great changes. Whether at the level of capital or innovation, blockchain has always been a hot word in 2016. The technical characteristics of distributed general ledger, encryption algorithm and programmability based on blockchain are regarded as the cornerstone of future digital society. Blockchain is expected to lead human society to evolve from information Internet to value Internet. Even, this most subversive technology after the Internet is likely to set off…
-
Social Tokens Crash After a Reported Hack at Roll Wallet
A number of social tokens, or cryptocurrencies supporting online communities, tanked early Sunday after a reported security breach at Roll. Tokens like WHALE, RARE and PICA tanked more than 50% during the early European hours, according to data provider CoinGecko. Meanwhile, the RLY token of competing social money platform Rally spiked to all-time highs. The founder of WHALE, a social coin underpinned by a basket of non-fungible tokens (NFTs), confirmed the hack on Twitter, stating that 2.17% of the coin’s supply has been compromised and the rest is secure in the cold storage. Whale price dumpSource: @NiftyReport Roll…
-
US Inflation Rate Accelerates in February, Could Go Higher as Economy Reheats
The U.S. Consumer Price Index (CPI) rose 0.4% in February, leaving it up 1.7% over the last 12 months, in line with economists’ expectations, a Labor Department report Wednesday showed. The 12-month rate represents an acceleration from January’s 1.4% clip, a pickup partly driven by higher gasoline prices, which rose 6.9% in February, accounting for over half of the seasonally adjusted increase in the all-items index, according to the Labor Department’s Bureau of Labor Statistics. Core CPI, which excludes food and energy prices, rose 0.1% in February, the report showed. That level was…
-
The Vision of Ethanim: Building New Public Chain for the Metaverse
As the advanced version of the digital era, many metaverse applications using multiple digital technologies are approaching us. Blockchain technology makes digital identity unique and digital asset confirmation also becomes possible. It builds a trustworthy economic form and also accelerates the development of metaverse. In the past six months or so, the metaverse conceptual application represented by crypto games has been noticed. Traditional game developers have introduced digital assets and NFT based on blockchain technology into the game precisely to form a new metaverse conceptual game with unified value and…
-
Major Australian ‘Buy Now Pay Later’ Firm May Offer Crypto Trading: Report
One of Australia’s largest buy now, pay later companies is reportedly looking at a move into stock and cryptocurrency trading. According to a report by the Wall Street Journal on Tuesday, Zip Co.’s co-founder Peter Gray said his company was looking at providing trading services through its native app in a bid to further engage its typically young consumers. The co-founder did not specify when the offering would launch or whether services for stocks would be released before cryptocurrency. Instead Gray suggested Zip would first roll out the services to its U.S….
-
GTMOBlob: Ein Blockchain-basiertes Ökosystem für die medizinische Versorgung
Derzeit werden alle medizinischen Informationssysteme mit Blick auf medizinische Einrichtungen verwaltet und betrieben. Um die Privatsphäre der Patienten zu schützen, ist die Weitergabe und der Austausch von Informationen außerhalb medizinischer Einrichtungen grundsätzlich nicht erlaubt, mit Ausnahme von Patienten, die den Zugang und die Einsicht in ihre persönlichen Daten beantragen. Ein solches einrichtungsorientiertes System zur Verwaltung medizinischer Patienteninformationen führt unweigerlich zu einer Fragmentierung medizinischer Daten zwischen verschiedenen Krankenhäusern, und die Fragmentierung medizinischer Daten verringert die Qualität medizinischer Dienstleistungen. Der steigende Bedarf an medizinischen Informationen im Bereich der medizinischen Forschung und der…
-
While top GameFis are experiencing crisis, where is the turning point? Elven World rises as a game changer!
“There are two paths to the future of mankind, either towards interstellar civilization or towards the virtual world of VR technology — the metaverse. ” As the pioneer of the metaverse sector, GameFi is a bottom-up revolution in nature. The future of GameFi will be extremely optimistic, but the current development has only just begun, not only that there are many challenges, but it is a long way to go.What’s the current state of GameFi industry? First Stage: Carnival The natural anti-monopoly attributes, ultra-high topicality and liquidity nature of GameFi make it an object of…
-
Draws Skepticism From Rival Analysts
A debate is raging among bitcoin traders after a chart-reading analyst spotted a pattern known as a “bull flag,” ostensibly portending a coming rally to $70,000 or beyond. The analysis, posted on the website Bitcoinist by Yashu Gola and affirmed by Bill Noble at Token Metrics, concluded that the bull flag has formed over the past month, and that the cryptocurrency’s price is set to pop after a breakout in recent days. But when it comes to identifying and interpreting price-chart patterns there’s an art to the science, and some practitioners of bitcoin technical…
-
Reasonable financial allocation, earn income at Coinbetter
With the sound of the gunshots of the Russian-Ukrainian war, A-share Hong Kong stocks fell collectively, and safe-haven funds poured into gold, oil and other sectors, hitting new highs in more than a year. In the face of a fall, what should we do? Under the influence of external tensions, the market’s demand for safe-haven funds continues to increase. Coinbetter finds a track for investors, insists on digging in the market and provides users with a variety of different types of diversified products. At present, Coinbetter has added a new…
-
NFT’s with True Ownership and Asset Backed Utility
Viviverse X ME Holdings join in an exclusive partnership to develop the worlds first real estate NFT collection in the metaverse. Each NFT gives the owner true ownership of an actual property that is developed by ME Holdings and rewards them with asset backed yields in terms of rental and capital gains generated. In addition owners simultaneously earn staking and utility rewards in Viviverse. The first batch will be minted on Aug 31st and made available throughout the Summer of 22. List pricing and whitelisting procedures will be made known on…
